Always when watching NGE and EoE I got the impression that the children pilots were mentally and psychologycally unstable on purpose; specially with Shinji since him being on a state of fragility or threat would activate Eva 01 berserk mode. This notion interests me because it fits well with the understanding that this secret organization is using these kids as tools for a project with a lot at stake, and the individual performance of the pilots is irrelevant.
Now watching 3.0+1.0, in spite of feeling the movie was terrible, I enjoyed this bit of lore when Asuka said that Rei was designed to be compliant and love Shinji, as if their whole lives and interactions are just enginnered and unauthentic. I also got the impression that she was indicating that Shinji by nerv design was intended to become shutdown, depressed and catatonic every time a crisis happened. Am I wrong in interpreting this from her words?
What is your opinion about this lore? Do you think Asuka works better as a "survivor clone"?

It was part of Yui master plan to get someone to love her son after all, since her husband was too dumb for it. To leave the footprints of two girls for him to pick, Asuka and Rei, and the plan b: ask her colleague to fake her age and help her son and initiate the Hikaru Genji Plan Beta, raise and date him into her own preferences in favor of taking care of Shinji.

yui is 2smart4us

Registration2 wrote:It was part of Yui master plan to get someone to love her son after all, since her husband was too dumb for it. To leave the footprints of two girls for him to pick, Asuka and Rei, and the plan b: ask her colleague to fake her age and help her son and initiate the Hikaru Genji Plan Beta, raise and date him into her own preferences in favor of taking care of Shinji.

yui is 2smart4us

“Listen, Mari, I’m going to make two clone girls so my son can pick one to bang. One will be surly and have huge self esteem problems and the other will be cold and have basically no personality to start with. If he doesn’t pick either, it’s gotta be you.”

“Wait, are you telling me that if your son doesn’t pick one of the clones you made for him you want me to pretend to be his age and groom him? What if he turns out to be gay?”

“Look, just mash your tits in his face. It’ll work. Those big bazongas of yours have to be good for something. They’re just so full and luscious, round and ripe. Trust me, he’s going to love them.”

”Well alright, it’s not like I have anything better to do, seeing as I’m apparently the immortal ageless daughter of Judas. Or maybe a vampire hunter. Fuck it we’ll fix it in post.”

Imagine dating a woman that calls you puppy. Lmao.

Natalie the Cat wrote:“Listen, Mari, I’m going to make two clone girls so my son can pick one to bang. One will be surly and have huge self esteem problems and the other will be cold and have basically no personality to start with. If he doesn’t pick either, it’s gotta be you.”

“Wait, are you telling me that if your son doesn’t pick one of the clones you made for him you want me to pretend to be his age and groom him? What if he turns out to be gay?”

“Look, just mash your tits in his face. It’ll work. Those big bazongas of yours have to be good for something. They’re just so full and luscious, round and ripe. Trust me, he’s going to love them.”

”Well alright, it’s not like I have anything better to do, seeing as I’m apparently the immortal ageless daughter of Judas. Or maybe a vampire hunter. Fuck it we’ll fix it in post.”

A+

Only we have the statement that Rei in Rebuild is mentally enginnered. Asuka and specially Shinji are completely your personal hypothesis there's nothing that support it.

rangure0412 wrote:Only we have the statement that Rei in Rebuild is mentally enginnered. Asuka and specially Shinji are completely your personal hypothesis there's nothing that support it.

Maybe I understood the dialogue wrongly. But Asuka said to Rei that there she was wasting her time on Shinji, trying to bring him out of depression, that the pilots were designed to become emotionally/psychologically stunted in order to not cause a crisis. Or something like that?

We're not told what exactly Asuka's "programming" was but from how she talks she definitely got some programming with regards to him which probably fed her resentment towards him once she found out.

Though I highly doubt that the goal had anything to do with getting Shinji a girlfriend and more with making them generally making the pilots attached to each other so they don't quit and behave as expected at crucial junction points, while still convincingly passing for normal teenagers. It's not even said that it was supposed to be specifically romantic attachment, just 'attachment'.

Shinji's own artificiality is more ambiguous, but he seems to have been carried to term normally and to have been a baby, so he is almost certainly the oldest - The starting piece around which everything else was engineered simply because he was there first. (Unless Mari is not a clone, but then certain lines in 2.0 cease to make sense... as does the very need for artificial pilots, if normal people can do it.)

We also know that he at least got a mindwipe & possibly further conditioning (as mentioned in Q; Fuyu & Gendo also bring up the possibility of 'brainwashing' in 1.0. Which probably would have involved stuffing him into an LcL tube and "readjusting his settings").

Natalie the Cat wrote:What if he turns out to be gay?”

I think we all know the answer to that one

In Japanese, it's not clear how much of this is literal and how much of it is figurative or metaphorical. I hypothesize Rei Q is a more manufactured "product" than the Shikinami series, but Asuka does say "Evangelion pilots like us", so maybe they're more similar than I think.

A shame we never get to know what the curse of the Evangelion really is and how exactly it began because all the pilots that are not Shinji are artificial in nature (Mari as well? Maybe? ) On the other hand what if Mari used the nabuconodozor key on herself after all that Made gendo a normal lillim able to Pilot unit 13 and would make the whole Mari is a female kaworu have a Lot of sense. My head canon is that Ayanami and shikinami and makinami are all clone series, with the makinami series being build for combat alone and for other purpuse that did not involved being and impact trigger because for some reason Mari causes the evas she has pilot go berserk and never have them awake by accident.
And with Shinji Ikari being something else, after all Yui some how reached the minus space and the gogholta object if what gendo said is true during the scene in the minus space.


Also the pilots being clones that can be programed would help explain the DSS collar and their room being booby trap with explosives who knows if the girls could have been sleeping agents the whole time, yet ritsuko decided to explain to Shinji that the DSS collar is his punishment instead of a basic security messure for the pilots, great move there ritsuko and Misato no wonder why the war has last 14 years.

They just display different levels of social awkwardness in they own way, except Mari, who is innatelly extremely socially skilled. This is the central point of the psychological layer of the narrative. Rei is the terminal case of asociality, Asuka is an egoist, Shinji lags behind in development. All this is caused by the specifics of their upbringing, which is especially accentuated in the original series. They do not trust society, because they experienced it as a chaotic unpredictable environment during their childhood. Finally, Shinji finds the way out, and it is clearly shown in the Rebuild.

They wouldn't make Mari wear a collar if there was zero danger - EVAs are simply apocalypse machines by nature.


It seems that "curse of EVA" was a metaphorical expression (like when Misato says that she and Ritsuko are "possessed" by EVAs in ep 23), not the name of a phenomenon - As Asuka explains it, stopping to grow is part of being a 'mock lillim' and the the same will happen to Shinji as well. (Asuka makes it sound like this would have happened even if he'd stayed at the village and never touched an EVA again)
Ie, that it's a consequence of their being artificial rather than due to spending a certain amount of time in an EVA.
In that promo Manga Mari also says that "we've just been given a longer spring of our life compared to the Lillim"

Perhaps the human-like veneer "peels" over time - or after going into high plug dephts.

Or they were designed to mimic human growth until they reached age 15 and no further because that's when Third Impact would eliminate all need to pass them off as humans. Or, if the timeskip was planned, and you can't pilot above a certain level of physical development, they could've deliberately stopped their growth in the "right" developmental stage.

Gendo doesn't mention making Mari when he talks about how he prepared the other two clone series specifically for this purpose, so I'd assume that she was the result of rogue action by her lookalike from the flashbacks. Or her "official" purpose was simply to guard the Third Angel's seal with no role beyond that.

It's worth noting that Gendo's plan works out in part because Mari lets Asuka have the kill (for which Asuka is very grateful and says she "owes" Mari one)
Asuka might just be more trusted by WILLE/ is generally the superior officer, but Mari's EVA was more intact at this point.
Hence why Mari's like, "Oh shit, Gendo wanted her to fight EVA 13 so it could eat her angel infection"

Kendrix wrote:They wouldn't make Mari wear a collar if there was zero danger - EVAs are simply apocalypse machines by nature.

Thats the thing, what i believe is that for all the things that Misato, ritsuko and wille discovered from nerv there is still information that they don't have about the evas, the pilots and the impacts and worse the only people that knows that information is people who is dead or is the enemy.

For example they thought that Shinji died, and well he was alive, they thought that there was no way for a 13° angel to appear, they thought that Shinji had 0% sinc with unit 1 and Also that Rei was dead, and in the end they fall into a trap because they thought that gendo was using seele for the final impact. And as far has rebuild goes the evas are only apocalíptic machines if You are Shinji Ikari piloting the Eva, or the Eva eats an angel or it was an Eva build for causing impact.

Also the pilots gave blade runner vibes just that instead of replicants being designated for certain roles its the pilots

The18°angel wrote:
Also the pilots gave blade runner vibes just that instead of replicants being designated for certain roles its the pilots

This seems acurate. Rei even has the limited lifespan, for the others the limit is more for how long they'll remain human-like

They were mostly designed with personalities that make sense for artificial warriors: Rei is a dedicated obedient soldier, Asuka is a proud, competitive fighter, Mari is a fearless, unflappable adrenaline junkie...

Shinji doesn't seem to fit into this, as he is sensitive, emotional and bad at thinking under pressure. It's possible that Yui and Gendo just left his personality genes like a normal kid by the two of them would naturally turn out, or that he is designed not for fighting, but for triggering awakenings. if heightened emotions trigger awakenings, then having him be sensitive and impulsive makes all the sense.

Kendrix wrote:Shinji's own artificiality is more ambiguous,

I remember when the third rebuild came out, and people theorized that the BM-03 written on Shinji feet when Willie took him out of the Eva, meant that he was biomass 3, ie. the third version of Shinji who came out of there or something like that.
Ironically, now after seeing 3.0+1.0, I think that all this thing is a bit inconsistent, because if Shinji was spending all this time inside the Eva, his hair should have grown like Rei's.

Anyway, if the pilots were really enginnered to be emotionally stunted and just a bunch of clones, I have to congratulate nerv/seele, this is a very efficient way of handling everything and preventing a pilot wanting to be god. I just don't understand why they would bring Shinji in the picture then, because instead of Rei or Asuka (the clones who were easy to control, literal modified copies of the scientists submerged in the Eva), he became the main pilot to fight the angels and he was a trouble to everyone scenarios.

But we see direct confirmation that Shinji is born naturally.
Maybe his memories are manipulated here and there, but his personality, as far as we can tell is his own...

SEELE-01 wrote:But we see direct confirmation that Shinji is born naturally.
Maybe his memories are manipulated here and there, but his personality, as far as we can tell is his own...

The movie implies that Yui managed to reach the gogolta object in the minus space, this means that she got to this place before being absorved by unit 01 so Shinji maybe born naturally But who says that yui was just a normal lillim when she got pregnant, also he remembers things like Yui and gendo chosing his and Rei names while in the womb, You know what would be a twist. If Shinji is the baseline that got use to create the other pilots.

Figured I'd ask a semi-relevant question in an old thread rather than making a new one.

In 1.11 Shiji has this line in the bath:



I don't remember that this line is ever explained later in the rebuilds. Does it reference Shinji's time in the Artificial Evolution Lab revealed by Fuyutsuki per the photograph in 3.33?

Speaking of that photo... can anyone make out the text on the back?
In fact, someone did! The text reads, 第3新東京市　人工進化研究所　EVA本体棟にて, translating to, "Tokyo-3, Artificial Evolution Laboratory, Inside Eva Main Control Building".

If so it indicates that the Lab work to engineer Shiji was pretty traumatic, if he remembers "bad things" despite having his memories erased.

nerv bae wrote:In 1.11 Shiji has this line in the bath:



I don't remember that this line is ever explained later in the rebuilds. Does it reference Shinji's time in the Artificial Evolution Lab revealed by Fuyutsuki per the photograph in 3.33?

I think this just mean that Shinji tend to remember bad experiences when he is in the bath. He is relaxed, so bad memories appear in his mind.

I don't think this is related to the erase of memory.


Also, I'm not sure if Shinji is really engineering. I know Asuka says Eva pilots are engineering, but I think she could be speaking only about herself and Rei (the clones).